Quick answer
Yes — Pingcron is a one-time-purchase alternative to Cronitor. It costs $79 once, while Cronitor runs $10/mo — about $120 per year, every year. Your jobs ping a URL when they run — Pingcron alerts you when a ping is late or missing. It is for people who want the job done on their own hardware without a renewal date — not for teams that live inside Cronitor's ecosystem.
The verdict
Switch to Pingcron if you are an individual or small team paying Cronitor $10/mo for work your own machine can do. Cronitor charges $360 over three years. Pingcron is $79, once — it pays for itself in 8 months.
Stay with Cronitor if your workflow depends on its integrations, you need enterprise features (SSO, admin controls, SLAs), or your team is large enough that per-seat collaboration tooling is worth the bill. Pingcron does not try to replicate those.
Head to head
| Pingcron | Cronitor | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $79 once | $10/mo solo ($120/yr), $50/mo team |
| Cost over 3 years | $79 | $360+ |
| Checks | Unlimited | Tiered |
| Your data | On your box (one SQLite file) | Their cloud |
| Cron expressions + timezones | Yes | Yes |
| Run duration tracking (start/end) | Yes | Yes |
| Desktop app | Yes | No |
| Source code | MIT, on GitHub | Closed |
| 5-year cost | $79 | $600 |
Where Cronitor still wins
- Ecosystem and integrations. Established tools accumulate years of third-party integrations, templates and add-ons. If your workflow is wired into Cronitor's ecosystem, switching means rebuilding that plumbing — a real cost.
- Team and enterprise features. Shared workspaces, granular permissions, SSO, audit logs and a vendor to call when something breaks — that is what the higher subscription tiers actually buy, and a pay-once app does not come with it.
- Familiarity and hiring. Cronitor is the name people already know. Onboarding a team onto a tool nobody has used before takes time the subscription never charges for.
Where Pingcron wins
- Price, permanently. $79 once versus $120/yr for as long as you use it. There is no renewal, no seat count and no tier gate.
- Two schedule types. "Expected every N minutes/hours" or a full 5-field cron expression with timezone support and a live next-3-runs preview.
- Grace periods. Allow N seconds of lateness per check before alerting — no false alarms because a backup ran 40 seconds long.
- Alerts on transitions only. Webhook (Slack/Discord/ntfy-friendly JSON) + SMTP email on down, recovery and explicit failure. Never spams repeats, survives restarts without re-firing.
The math
Cronitor charges $360 over three years. Pingcron is $79, once — it pays for itself in 8 months.
- After 1 year: Pingcron has cost you $79 total — Cronitor has cost $120.
- After 3 years: Pingcron is still $79 — the subscription is at $360.
- After 5 years: Pingcron is still $79 — the subscription is at $600.
Common questions
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — the full source is MIT-licensed at github.com/bensblueprints/pingcron-mvp and always will be. The $79 buys the 1-click Windows installer and lifetime updates for people who don't want to touch a terminal.
How is this different from an uptime monitor?
Uptime monitors watch whether your site is up. They can't see a backup cron that "ran" but wrote to a read-only mount. Pingcron watches for the absence of a signal — your job pings when it finishes, and Pingcron yells when the ping doesn't arrive.
Will it spam me with repeat alerts?
No. Alerts fire only on state transitions — down, recovery, explicit failure — and the state machine is persisted, so a restart never double-alerts. If you want repeat-nagging until acknowledged, that's a thing Cronitor does that Pingcron deliberately doesn't.
Why not just self-host Healthchecks.io?
Honestly? Healthchecks.io's OSS self-host is excellent and more mature — if you're happy assembling a Django/Postgres deployment, use it. Pingcron is the "one process, one file, five minutes" version, with a desktop mode nobody else has.
Try Pingcron — $79, one time
Or get Pingcron plus every other app in the suite: the OneTimeSuite bundle is currently $97, one time.